Chasing that Very First High
When I first turned to drastic measures to control my weight, I experienced a euphoric high and initial ‘buzz’ that I had never felt before. I thrived on the sense of control that was allowing me to physically change my body. But the empowering self-discipline and subsequent weight-loss was nothing more than a temporary ‘honeymoon’ period that soon faded.
Truthfully, I was riding a ‘wave,’ but that wave soon broke and dispersed into intense despair and emotional distress that came with the relentless symptoms and demands of the disease. I was left in a torturous daily battle, where I was completely at the mercy of my ED.
My anorexia nervosa and purging anorexia progressed into full-blown bulimia as I tried to stabilise myself and ‘hold my own’ throughout my school years. Unfortunately, the anorexia came back with a vengeance in my late teens after I had ventured into the big wide world of employment, where my symptoms rapidly escalated beyond anything I could have imagined.
I struggled with anorexia and purging throughout my 20s, where I ended up hospitalised on numerous occasions with admissions into both psychiatric wards and eating disorder units. But despite my warped eating disorder brain telling me this was an achievement, it regrettably exposed me to a toxic world of extreme eating disorder competitiveness that left me feeling like a fraud.
I eventually came to realise that my weight-loss was never going to be enough as the goal-posts would forever change. It was futile, destructive, and not an achievement at all. Being admitted into hospital didn’t make my eating disorder any more valid than when I was a medically ‘healthy’ weight struggling in the community. It had merely prolonged the inevitable.
Since turning 30, I have gone round in circles with the different ED diagnoses, although my primary battle has been with bulimia nervosa. The majority of this time I have presented at a medically ‘healthy’ weight, unless I was in one of my intermittent purging anorexia episodes that came with symptomatic weight-loss.
A turning point and saving grace that made me determined to stay in the community was some unfortunate experiences I had whilst in residential treatment where I promised myself I would never be admitted into hospital again. I did have a couple of very short admissions into the local psychiatric ward for symptoms of my Bipolar II disorder, but I never went into a specialist ED unit again. My fear of ever having to go back gave me miraculous strength to turn my anorexic relapses around, even when I had relapsed past what had previously been my ‘point of no return’ where hospitalisation was inevitable.
The erratic symptoms and destructive behaviours of each of my eating disorder diagnoses were primarily fuelled by one motive, my weight. If I wasn’t focused on losing as much weight as possible, I was desperately trying to prevent weight gain after being ‘weak’ because I had consumed foods that I told myself I was not allowed.
I came to realise in recent years that I had spent my life striving to reach a subconscious goal centred around my need to control my weight that was feeding my dysfunctional relationship with food. And that was me chasing the initial ‘high’ I had experienced when I first purged and lost weight at the age of 12. But in reality, this had merely been a temporary, fictitious honeymoon phase, so my efforts to strive for that feeling proved futile, because that first ‘high’ never came, and it was never going to.
Instead, I was pulled deeper into a longstanding fight with an eating disorder, where I built my life around facilitating the demands of the disease. It was my primary focus where it had embedded itself in my being and manipulatively tricked me into believing it was a part of me. Anorexia and bulimia dominated my every waking hour for so many years and destroyed my quality of life. I felt depressed, anxious, and miserable because I was not living but merely existing as a slave to ‘IT’.
What was the point, I now ask? Well, there wasn’t one, because I was chasing something that once felt real but had only ever been a fantasy!
